Renewing the faith of 67: Indigenous recognition remains elusive

Five decades on from the 1967 referendum, indigenous politics are complex and recognition is elusive.

Paul Keating at Sydney’s Redfern Park in 1992.

Half a century has passed since the May 1967 constitutional referendum, when voters overwhelmingly approved reforms to the governance of Aboriginal affairs: five long, fraught decades in indigenous politics, decades gone by that allow events to take on their true contours in retrospect, and thus highlight their ultimate causes and their unfolding consequences. This past holds rich lessons for us if we can read it well and see the similarities and the telling differences between the choices our predecessors faced and those that stand before us today.

The referendum called 50 years ago by the Coalition government of prime minister Harold Holt was dry in wording and seemed limited in scope, but its impact has been long-term. It has helped to reshape Australia’s self-image and the ­national approach to Aboriginal people and indigenous culture — so much so that today’s proponents of a new referendum hope their proposals for constitutional reform also may have the potential to bring about a revolutionary change in the social landscape.

The bar is set high: a national majority of yes votes and support by a majority of the states are ­required for a referendum measure to pass. Only eight reform proposals have been carried in the 44 referendums held since Federation: the 1967 vote was by far the most successful, winning more than 90 per cent support and the backing of voters in every state.

Few members of today’s political and critical establishments have direct memory of the event; contemporary records and historical accounts can go only so far in establishing the reasons for such a groundswell of support, but the key features of the campaign are clear enough. There was completely ­biparti­san endorsement of the referendum proposals by the major political parties at a time when the standing and authority of politicians was much higher than it is today; church organisations gave their backing; the chief indigenous rights campaigners in the public eye, Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders general secretary Faith Bandler and Bill Onus, the Victorian Aboriginal referendum movement’s ­director, were figures of great dignity and appeal.

Above all, the cause was one mainstream voters found easy to adopt. It was presented as a simple act of justice, a way of ­levelling the playing field, of giving equal rights to Aboriginal Australians. There were no losers, only winners.

In this way, the referendum proposal incarnated the core Australian legend: it was a chance to say yes to equality, to fairness; mateship trumped prejudice. The decision neither conferred citizenship nor voting rights, both of which had long since been granted, at least on paper; it merely struck out an outdated constitutional provision regarding state revenue and gave the federal parliament the power to override state policies towards Aboriginal people, a power used only sparingly in the decades since.

The real force of the referendum was more elusive and more diffuse. An upswing of enthus­iasm for Aboriginal causes came in its wake and inspired a generation of idealists to live and work in the remote Aboriginal bush regions of Australia: activists and community development specialists, lawyers and anthropologists were all engaged in laying the groundwork for the vast archipelago of indigenous organisations that now span the continent. Funding for Aboriginal social programs increased exponentially, welfare payments were introduced to cover the needs of pastoral workers made redundant by the changing economics of the northern cattle industry, new settlements and outstations were set up in the deserts, the Kimberley, Cape York and the Top End.

Public understanding of Australia’s history, colonial and pre-colonial, also began to shift. Archeological discoveries ­uncov­ered the vertiginously deep record of the Aboriginal past, at first back 10,000, then 30,000, then as far as 60,000 years. Meanwhile, the contemporary Aboriginal art movement took hold in the desert: icons and symbols and patterns from central Australia ­swiftly became part of Australia’s vernacular visual vocabulary.

There was a legal and governmental complement to these changes on the cultural front. Land rights in the Northern Territory, introduced by the Whitlam Labor government and legislated by its conservative successor in 1976, gave several remote area groups collective inalienable title to their land and created a new representative structure of land councils. By this stage Aboriginal politicians, cultural performers and sports stars were becoming familiar figures in the national landscape. Invisibility and caricature gradually were replaced by distinctiveness and prominence.

Of all this, the foundation charter was the 1967 referendum, which served at once to mandate a new approach and to help wash away any disquieting consciousness of what had gone before.

A new foundation; new horizons. By the early 1980s, within half a generation of the referendum’s passage, it was already becoming clear that two relatively distinct Aboriginal populations were emerging, each with their particular social architectures, educational profiles and economic prospects. There were remote area groups in the less settled parts of Australia, many of them still living in communities first founded as Christian missions, and still speaking their own traditional languages as mother tongue; and there were substantial regional and urban indigenous populations, living in the great seaboard capitals or small inland towns.

As if to bridge this divergence, in the early 80s the federal ­Department of Aboriginal Affairs adopted a new and inclusive definition of indigenous identity, reli­ant on descent line and com­munity acceptance. Aboriginal and Torres Strait background, once a stigma, gradually became a source of pride, an identity to be claimed and proclaimed.

Inevitably, the greater acceptance of the indigenous element in Australia’s background and in contemporary society was an evolving phenomenon, advancing on many linked fronts, spurred by popular sentiment and by governmental directive. Special education funding and employment programs designed to foster an enfranchised Aboriginal middle class and indigenous public service workers were quick to achieve results; academic Aboriginal studies programs aimed at Aboriginal students and the mainstream have multiplied.

Census figures show a rapid ­increase in the indigenous population, partly through increased self-identification, partly through the natural effects of inter­marriage — for more than two-thirds of unions involving people of Aboriginal descent today are contracted with non-indigenous partners. The trend is strong: in 1921, the indigenous population was estimated at about 70,000; the 1991 census gives a figure of 265,000, or 1.5 per cent of the population; today’s figure is 669,000, or 3 per cent of the ­national total — and only 91,000 of this number are remote area residents. Hence the category of Aborigine has been changing over time and expanding into a size­able and increasingly politically ­engaged minority: and this shift ­itself has pointed implications for any referendum proposal seeking mainstream assent to an expansion of indigenous political rights or rights in resources, economic assets or land.

But the most far-reaching down­stream result of the 1967 referendum and the new epoch it marked in the management of ­Aboriginal rights and interests was the coming of native title, established by the ruling of the High Court in the Mabo case in June 1992. Northern Territory land rights had been ceded by a simple act of federal parliament over tracts of land in an empty-seeming, remote portion of the country. Native title was accepted on the basis of a much deeper principle: the concept of pre-existing Aboriginal law and tenure. At a stroke it effected a further shift in the psychology of Australia; it made the nation, by legal judgment, into an occupying settler state.

Paul Keating, who was prime minister when Mabo was handed down, gave his famous speech at Redfern in December that same year, excoriating the record of crimes committed in colonial days, and this dark assessment, ­deliv­ered by the figure at the helm of the federal government, had consequences of its own: it articulated and focused Aboriginal memories of disenfranchisement, it helped overturn benign foundation stories of Australia; indeed, it cast a bleak retrospective shadow over the entire national project — a shadow that required, and ­demanded, expiation.

Perhaps just as significantly, the Redfern address moralised the politics of Aboriginal history to an intense degree and transformed opinions on indigenous affairs into a class marker. Positive views on Aboriginal questions now became tokens of a general world view, a world view at once progressive and revisionist, enlightened and free from the vulgar trappings of self-interest.

This development long outlasted the Keating era and ­remains one of its principal legacies. It created a constellation of new attitudes for members of the knowledge classes at the apex of the cultural and social pyramid to display, it served as the seedbed for welcome to country ceremonies, for reconciliation action plans in corporate offices, for keen public sponsorship of indigenous creative work. But mainstream Australian views on indigenous issues and ­towards Aboriginal communities, their cultures and their aspirations for a new political settlement ­remain rather more nuanced. Gauging public positions on such delicate issues through broad-scale opinion polling is notoriously difficult — but it is very noticeable that neither major party has ever dared to seek an electoral mandate for a far-­reaching set of indigenous policy reforms such as the introduction of native title. The last time a question regarding Aboriginal rights went before the Australian electorate was 50 years ago.

The most recent constitutional change campaign pitting reformist against traditionalist ideas for Australia, the republic referendum of 1999, offers a telling index of the deep and well-masked divide ­between progressive and conser­vative sentiment among the wider public. Support for change from the existing system to a republic foundered on the specifics of the proposed model. Opinion polling understated the depth of the opposition; the proposal, though keenly backed by a great majority of prominent political figures and cultural celebrities, was rejected by substantial margins in every state. But at the beginning of the ­debate, the prime minister of the day, John Howard, had drafted a proposed new constitutional preamble, including a warm acknowledgment of Australia’s pre-settlement Aboriginal past, and the notion stayed with him long after the referendum question had gone down to defeat. In October 2007, just a month before he lost power in his last federal election contest, he promised a “new reconciliation” and pledged himself, if returned, to seek an amendment of the constitution to acknowledge indigenous Australians.

Three months later, the atmospherics of Aboriginal discussions had swung in a sharply different direction. Kevin Rudd was the victorious prime minister and radical hopes were high. As his first act in the new parliament, Rudd offered up a fulsome national apology to the Stolen Generations, with the clear hope his declaration would serve to turn a page in Australian history and set the scene for closer co-operative ties between his government and indigenous groups.

Rudd made a well-choreographed visit to northeast Arnhem Land later that year. Local Yolngu clan leaders presented him with a petition calling on the federal government to work towards constitutional recognition of “our prior ownership and rights”. A new dynamic was emerging in indigenous politics, and the Canberra ­estab­lishment felt the need to ride the wave. Reconciliation Australia, a ginger group established in 2001 on the ashes of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, was now given the additional task of promoting constitutional recognition. A new, publicly funded sub-body, Recognise, came into being, complete with a large red capital R logo, and promptly began a series of national consciousness-raising campaigns.

Rudd’s successor as Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, made a pilgrimage of her own to northeast Arnhem Land and took over stewardship of the constitutional reform journey, setting up an ­“expert panel” in 2010 to “build consensus” and advise on specific models for change. Other advisory panels, citizen and parliamentary, also were formed in due course: free-form debates and regional ­forums were held.

In this hothouse climate, moderate options found little favour; a rush to stake out hardline positions and demands ensued. When the expert panel, more than a year on, handed down its suggestions for reform, which included new clauses and a special new recognition section in the body of the Constitution, acknowledging traditional languages and the ­con­tinuing indigenous relationship to traditional lands and ­waters, all dreams of simplicity and a straight­forward referendum question of modest scope were dead.

The optics of the reform drive had become critical. There was a need to find support from ­indigenous Australians for any proposed changes to the nation’s founding charter, but there was a countervailing need to craft a ­proposal with appeal to the broader electorate.

At this juncture, a new figure took the helm of the federal government and of the constitutional debate: Tony Abbott, a patriotic conservative in the Howard mould but one with a strong ­record of personal commitment to indigenous causes in the remote outback.

Abbott believed in the goal of constitutional change as a gesture of declarative inclusion, as a means to reaffirm the Australian compact of egalitarianism, even as a project that might encourage the mainstream and indigenous worlds of Australia to grow ­towards each other and find similarities between themselves. He hoped a referendum could be held on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 vote, and the symbolism ­inherent in this hope spurred keen official attempts to spark public enthusiasm. Recognise continued its national relays and ambassadorial ventures and drum­med up a flood-tide of media coverage.

Abbott’s advocacy had the ­potential to build conservative support for a generously worded preamble, and he was even prepared to countenance some special means to carry indigenous voices into political debate — maybe a new deliberative chamber, maybe reserved parliamentary seats on the New Zealand model. But his brief reign, punctuated by his high-profile, week-long visits to remote communities, came to an abrupt end and, with it, much of the potential for winning the support of sceptical, traditionalist mainstream Australians evaporated.

Impasse; the political and ­bureaucratic networks engaged with Australian public affairs management had run out of moves. In truth, mainstream voters had long since turned away from any mild interest in Aboriginal issues, and general goodwill ­towards indigenous people and sympathy for the much-publicised plight of bush communities were on the decline. If the popular notion of the Aboriginal element in Australia had been uplifted by the triumphs of figures such as Cathy Freeman and famous AFL stars in sporting endeavours and by the prominence of indigenous cultural performers in multiple fields, there was a gradual shift in the aftermath of the apology — a subterranean shift, fed by vexation and low-level resentments. In the eyes of everyday voters, the campaign for Aboriginal rights, privileges and special funding dispensations seemed to have no end: the gap never closed, the goal of reconciliation remained on the horizon, out of reach, there was ­always a new target for remedial activity — first the fraught, protracted negotiation of native title, then the apology, then recognition. Any possibility of candid debate on ­Aboriginal questions seemed stifled by the looming shadow of section 18C of the Racial Dis­crimination Act.

This was the context for the ­ascent to power, in the middle years of this decade, of Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten, two figures selected by their peers to ­restore order to their respective sides of politics. They shared a ­desire to cool the temperature of public discussion on Aboriginal policy and shared a need to be seen to be engaged in the cause of indigenous advancement, and to be making progress towards a successful recognition referendum.

They also shared an exquisite dilemma: in 1967 bipartisan major party support strengthened the referendum cause, but in 2017 the involvement and advocacy of high-profile politicians would breed only cynicism in the electorate. The two party leaders, in an ­unusual act of concord, hit on the natural solution. Together they ­established a new panel, government-funded but placed carefully at arm’s length.

This body, the 16-member Referendum Council, is packed with veterans of Aboriginal affairs debate: former politicians, corporate figures, indigen­ous men and women prominent in mainstream Australia. Their task, similar to that of the previous expert panel, whose co-chairman, lawyer Mark Leibler, also sits on the new council, is to advise the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader on “progress and next steps” towards a successful referendum and consult to that end with “indigenous Australians and the broader community”.

Quite a challenge, given the barely veiled establishment consensus behind a “minimalist” ­option for change — a warm preamble or a statement of acknowledgment in the Constitution, the removal of otiose or outmoded subclauses remaining in the original 1901 document, and nothing more: a form of words artfully framed to be compatible with the Australian public’s sense of just dealing and fair play.

But the past decade of negotiations and deliberations have conceded to Aboriginal Australians something like a right of veto over any question to be put to the ­nation on referendum day. Who, though, speaks for indigenous Australia, spread as it is across scores of regions and made up of hundreds of very different cultural groups? In a bid to fix a consensual position, the council has been holding a series of 12 “Aboriginal-led and managed” First Nations dialogues, which culminate in a national convention taking place next week, on the precise anniversary of the 1967 referendum, at Uluru, now transformed from a desert ritual site into an emblem of pan-Aboriginal identity.

These dialogues, each limited to 100 participants, by invitation only and arranged exclusively by a local “host organisation”, have come to a radical endpoint: their demand is for a new Aboriginal and Islander-elected chamber to be set up as a representative body, a pan-indigenous voice that parliament is obliged to consult.

The call for an overall treaty or set of treaties to be concluded ­between Australia and its various indigenous nations is also winning strong support. This week’s ­national convention, according to The Australian’s indigenous affairs editor, Stephen Fitzpatrick, will probably not only reject the “minimalist” model but also lay plans for a nationwide “resistance campaign” against any such proposal — thus effectively killing it off in the hope that more substantive changes can somehow be secured.

A peculiar space for political engagement is thus emerging. A largely self-selected Aboriginal and Islander leadership cadre is preparing to pursue, as its chief priority, dramatic concessions of symbolic prestige, representative and even sovereign rights from the commonwealth, just as austere governmental surveillance and welfare control regimes are tightened further under new policies imposed on the bush communities of the inland and the north. An ever more integrated and successful city-based indigenous middle class seems increasingly to be wedded to campaigns for various distinctive forms of recognition, as if protest, in succession to genealogical connection and cultural preservation, has become the new guarantor of indigenous commitment and identity.

But the maximalist strategy courts its own Waterloo, born precisely from indigenous success. Mainstream Australians these days see a great more of Aboriginal Australians than in the past. They see indigenous figures promoted and excelling in a range of fields; they are also keenly aware of the many instruments of social engineering and many streams of funding devoted to Aboriginal and Islander advancement.

Tolerance and intolerance, generosity and lack of generosity vie within the national sentiment in this area — but the high watermark of general public interest in Aboriginal issues has long since passed. Harder economic times make for more self-involved attitudes, and the electorate’s composition also is changing rapidly. Each year that brings in 190,000 new migrants brings in a voting group disinclined to take on board the moral debts of past generations and decades. Public education programs of the kind Canberra mandarins favour to bolster their preferred causes also tend to backfire and spark a counter-narrative. Given this landscape, and the Brexit example, and the American rebellion against political correctness that elected Donald Trump, few strategists would be confident in staging any referendum in a Western country and anticipating a sure result in conformity with progressive expectations.

Hence the present unacknowledged crisis. The referendum could not be held to meet its 50th anniversary date, and it may not be held at all in the immediate future unless an implausible compromise between the inconsistent positions of the minimalists and maximalists can be fudged somehow. Even if a national vote is eventually conducted, 2017 is far from 1967: mainstream Australians were prepared then to vote yes in a long-prepared and largely symbolic referendum, motivated by conscience, by sympathy and by pity for a small and ill-used minority. They are far less likely to vote yes today, and thus concede moral priority and special status to a much more substantial cohort of their fellow citizens, a population group defined purely by racial descent line, a group that will be approaching a million in number, or almost 5 per cent of the national total, by the time a referendum comes into view.

And so the idea of a modest, simple constitutional revision, a goal that seemed so welcome and so straightforward when it was first proposed a decade or so ago, now hovers in a grey zone of ­potentiality, frustratingly out of reach. The sombre chaser to this saga is that failure to proceed to recognition now that expectations have been so long in the air will merely feed the general public sense that Aboriginal questions admit of no simple resolution, while indigenous radicals will ­regard the breakdown of their push for extensive new constitutional rights and reserved provisions as further proof of perfidy at the heart of the settler state.

A dark tale bound, it seems, for a long, drawn-out and disappointing end.

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